onOne Software Perfect Photo Suite 7 Review

Thanks for check­ing out my onOne Soft­ware Per­fect Photo Suite 7 Review.

Per­fect Photo Suite 7 is a great col­lec­tion of seven prod­ucts designed to enhance your pho­tos and save time in post-​processing. There are a plethora of fil­ters that you can use very quickly to adjust your pho­tos, or you can cre­ate some very unique results with advanced tech­niques using lay­ers, masks, blend modes and other tools to cre­ate out­stand­ing results.

You can use Per­fect Photo Suite 7 as a stand alone prod­uct, but it also inte­grates nicely with

• Adobe Pho­to­shop
• Adobe Light­room
• Apple Aper­ture

Per­fect Photo Suite 7: Per­fect Layers

Let’s start with some good news. Per­fect Lay­ers is free! If you don’t have Phở­to­shop, Per­fect Lay­ers gives you an inter­face that allows you to use many of the most pow­er­ful fea­tures of Phở­to­shop — lay­ers, mask­ing, blend modes and opac­ity. With these tools, you can eas­ily per­form selec­tive edit­ing of your images, com­bine images, and cre­ate other cre­ative effects that just aren’t pos­si­ble with Aper­ture or Light­room. For those of you who already have Phở­to­shop, Per­fect Lay­ers is still worth a look. That’s because it puts a new spin on cre­at­ing masks. You still have your brush, but onOne Soft­ware also includes its mask­ing bug, shown below.

I used a rec­tan­gu­lar (or pla­nar) mask­ing bug on this image to demon­strate. You can change the bug to a round/​oval shape, also. The anten­nae on the mask­ing bug let you change its size, opac­ity and feath­er­ing. If you pre­fer, there are fields in the upper-​left cor­ner to make the same adjust­ments using a slider. That’s also where you can change the shape of the mask­ing bug.

You can change the color dis­play of the mask. The top image shows all lay­ers. If I had another image in the layer stack on the right col­umn, it would appear through the mask instead of that checker­board. In the image imme­di­ately above, I switched to a Red mask view. You can also use White, Dark, or the Greyscale exam­ple shown below to see a larger view of the mask that appears next to the thumb­nail in the lay­ers panel.

Some­times the bug just isn’t the right tool for your mask. You can turn off the mask­ing bug and use the brush instead. Like the mask­ing bug, you’re able to con­trol the mask in a few dif­fer­ent ways.

The brush stroke at the top is at 100% opac­ity using a 250 pixel brush and 25 pixel feather. I low­ered the opac­ity of the bot­tom stroke to 35%. If you’re work­ing with a broad area, this works fine. If you’re try­ing to work with some intri­cate detail, then you may want to use another option.

You can switch the brush to another mode that uses edge detec­tion by check­ing the box titled “Per­fect Brush” on the brush con­trol fields above the image. The brush will look for edges and only mask areas that are the same as you brush with the cen­ter sym­bol (a minus to paint-​out or a plus to paint-​in). In this exam­ple above, I didn’t let the minus sym­bol brush the win­dows on part of the Capi­tol build­ing. The edge detec­tion soft­ware excluded those areas from the mask. For bet­ter results, zoom in and use an appropriate-​sized brush for the area that you’re brushing.

Edge detec­tion eats up more of your CPU cycles, so turn it off when it isn’t needed for bet­ter per­for­mance. Depend­ing upon your sys­tem resources, it could start lag­ging as you’re paint­ing while edge detec­tion is active.

Per­fect Lay­ers works as a stand-​alone appli­ca­tion or as a plu­gin. You don’t need to have Aper­ture, Light­room or Phở­to­shop to use it, but it inte­grates with those pro­grams. I was a bit sur­prised to learn that it rec­og­nizes Phở­to­shop PSD files and layers. Perfect Lay­ers includes tools to trans­form, crop, brush and retouch images.

Per­haps one of its best fea­tures is that onOne Soft­ware now has a uni­fied inter­face for the other tools in Per­fect Photo Suite. If you look at the menu bar on the upper-​right side, you’ll see that you can eas­ily select other tools in Per­fect Photo Suite within Per­fect Lay­ers. That addresses one of the grum­bles I’ve had with pre­vi­ous ver­sions of the tools. It seemed that each tool had its own way of doing things. The mask­ing bug was a very use­ful fea­ture in Focal Point, but wasn’t avail­able in other tools. Per­fect Lay­ers has a sense of con­sis­tency among the var­i­ous parts of Per­fect Photo Suite.

This inter­face isn’t com­plete, though. Per­fect Photo Suite 6 started the inte­gra­tion, but it left some tools — Mask, Frame, Resize and Focus — to launch from Per­fect Lay­ers into their own win­dow and user inter­face. Now in Per­fect Photo Suite 7, it seems that only Focal Point 2 (Focus on the menu bar) launches its own appli­ca­tion. All of the oth­ers are nicely inte­grated within the Per­fect Lay­ers inter­face. That inte­gra­tion is a wel­come improve­ment over the pre­vi­ous version.

PhotoFrame and Pho­to­Tools are no longer prod­ucts in the Per­fect Photo Suite, but their capa­bil­ity (and more) exists in the other products.

Per­fect B&W: The New App in the Suite

For most of my Black & White needs, I’ve used Sil­ver Efex Pro by Nik Soft­ware. It’s an out­stand­ing tool and I think it sets the bar for any other tool that enters the Black & White mar­ket. So how does Per­fect B&W stack up against Sil­ver Efex Pro? First, take a look at the user interface.

Per­fect B&W has all of ton­ing and color fil­ters you would expect from a B&W prod­uct. Sil­ver Efex Pro added bor­ders to its prod­uct and this looks like an easy fea­ture to add, given onOne’s expe­ri­ence with Photo Frame. Sure enough, you can see Bor­der are one of the many options in the panel on the right side. There are eight cat­e­gories of bor­der styles (though one is for tex­tures) and each has mul­ti­ple options. You can change the size, opac­ity and blend mode of each bor­der type.

One of the panel options that sur­prised me was a Glow option. That’s not some­thing I’ve typ­i­cally seen in a black & white tool, but it’s a wel­come addi­tion. The Glow is rather easy to manip­u­late. There are two slid­ers to range the amount of Glow and Halo, and you can change the blend mode of the glow. Using a Screen blend mode with the Glow can give an inter­est­ing high key appearance.

One of the the meth­ods that Black & White users adopted is the Zone sys­tem to show the range of detail from black to white. Per­fect B&W has a cou­ple of tools to help, but it’s prob­a­bly not as detailed as some may have used in the past.

The first method is to check for clip­ping on either end of the scale, as shown below:

Blue rep­re­sents detail lost in the shad­ows and Red rep­re­sents detail lost in the high­lights. If you click to enlarge this image, you can see just a hint of high­light clip­ping in the dog’s fore­head area. In this shot, it’s OK for the back­ground clip­ping to appear because it’s sup­posed to be black. How­ever, this handy dis­play shows that I need to adjust his eyes and snout to bring back some detail that’s clip­ping in the shadows.

The other method is to change the Mask View Mode to Zone, which reveals a grayscale rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the dif­fer­ent detail zones.

Per­fect B&W presents you with a nearly com­plete B&W pro­cess­ing solu­tion. It doesn’t have tools for crop­ping or retouch­ing, but those are avail­able in the free Per­fect Lay­ers tool that hosts the inter­face. Per­fect B&W includes some selec­tive brushes:

• Bright­ness
• Con­trast
• Detail
• Tar­geted Brightness
• Selec­tive Color

You can use these brushes to paint their effect selec­tively. The Tar­geted Bright­ness tool is a bit dif­fer­ent than the other brushes. Instead of paint­ing over an area, you click on an area that you want to change and then drag the tool like a slider to increase or decrease brightness.

As for the Selec­tive Color brush…all I can say is that you should use it with judi­cious care.

I’m impressed with Per­fect B&W. You can use one of the exist­ing pre­sets to very quickly apply a black & white style to your image, or you can take your time craft­ing the set­tings to suit your own sense of style. Some­times I’ll start with one of the pre­sets and then tweak things a bit here or there. It makes B&W pro­cess­ing fast, yet per­son­al­ized. You can save your own pre­sets to use later, which saves both time and your pre­cious memory.

Per­fect Effects

This pro­gram is so chock-​full of good­ies it’s hard to know where to start, so let’s start with what we’ve already covered.

• Mask­ing Bug
• Mask­ing Brush w/​Perfect Brush Edge Detection
• A Plethora of Borders
• Black & White filters
• Glow Fil­ters
• Tex­tures
• Sharp­en­ing
• Inte­grated with Per­fect Lay­ers interface

That’s a pretty good start, but there’s plenty more. In fact, too much for me to go into all of the var­i­ous fil­ters. I’ll touch on a few by way of exam­ple, though. Suf­fice it to say that you have all the power of lay­ers, blend­ing modes, layer mask, opac­ity slid­ers and var­i­ous effect options at your disposal.

As with Per­fect B&W and other prod­ucts in the suite, you have the option to choose an exist­ing effect and apply it glob­ally or selec­tively. You can mod­ify the presents or cre­ate your own by tweak­ing and com­bin­ing exist­ing effects. Once you’ve cre­ated an effect that you like, save it as a pre­set so you can use it again with min­i­mal effort, time saved, and out­stand­ing results.

In my own work­flow, I tend to start with some kind of con­trast, enhance the exist­ing col­ors, and then decide if I want to add an effect like a glow or some­thing grungy. A lit­tle sharp­en­ing to top it off (though I tend to do that before I add a Glow effect). Let’s take a look with a photo that has warm and cool elements.

Here’s where we start. The over­all image is a bit flat. We have a cool area in the sky and a warm area in the sign and restau­rant. Our fore­ground sub­ject could use a bit of help, too.

My first step is to add some con­trast to the whole image. There are plenty of options under the Con­trast sec­tion of effects, but I tend to like the one called Daily Vit­a­min. Here’s the change after one click to select that effect.

For the next step, I want to draw out a cooler color in the sky. Under the Basic Brushes col­lec­tion of effects, I chose Brush Cooler. At first, I started using this like a typ­i­cal brush in Pho­to­shop or Aper­ture, slid­ing my cur­sor around the page to paint in the effect. Here’s the result I achieve part-​way through.

The good news is that I’m pleased with the change in the sky. You can see some of the orig­i­nal color still in the sky where I hadn’t brushed yet just above the ship and near the palm trees on the right side of the image. The prob­lem with this tech­nique is that it can be sloppy. It’s too easy to over­lap into areas that you don’t want to affect, par­tic­u­larly in tough spots like those trees. The sky shines through, but mask­ing out those leaves and palm fronds is really complicated…or is it?

The red area shows the mask that’s unaf­fected by the Brush Cooler effect. Look at the details in those leaves, the string of lights on top of the ship and other places. I can’t mask that accu­rately with a reg­u­lar brush. How­ever, the Per­fect Brush did all the work for me.

When you use the Per­fect Brush edge detec­tion, don’t paint the brush as you may do nor­mal. Instead, just dab the cen­ter on the area of color that you want to change. That’s all I did here. I made a 500 pixel brush with a 50 pixel feather. Should be kind of sloppy, right? Not if you turn on Per­fect Brush and just dab the spots. Per­fect Effects will detect the edges and apply a mask so it only impacts the area that you want.

This is the kind of mask­ing tool I’ve wanted for a long time. Imag­ine replac­ing that blue sky with an image of the per­fect clouds. It could be kind of dif­fi­cult to achieve with all of those trees and com­pli­cated ele­ments in this shot, but not with the Per­fect Brush.

Once you have an effect the way you like it, be sure to click the Add but­ton to cre­ate a new layer before choos­ing another effect. Oth­er­wise, all of your changes will get elim­i­nated and replaced by the default of the next effect. That’s handy when you just want to click through and see one effect after another, but you have to remem­ber to com­mit the effects you like before adding to them with some­thing else. The Add but­ton in the Effects Stack does that for you.

Now let’s see about pulling our sub­ject out a bit. To do that, I added two effects:

• Brush Lighter on her face, skirt and Mickey Glove to brighten them up a bit
• Sub­tle Vignette to bring down the bright­ness if the edges

The next thing I wanted to do was enhance the sign just a bit. The col­ors are already warm, but I thought it was lack­ing some def­i­n­i­tion. Part of the prob­lem is the areas sur­round­ing the sign are also a bit flat. I decided to make a sub­tle change using a Glow. Here’s what I did:

• I selected the Angel Glow effect
• Next, I added a round Mask­ing Bug to cover the area of the sign, and feath­ered it out just a bit
• I inverted the mask so the Angel Glow effect only affected the area cov­ered by the Mask­ing Bug
• Then I licked the Options but­ton in the Effects Stack to bring up the Blend­ing Options
• I set the Apple Effects To: so it only added the Angel Glow to the shad­ows of the area being masked by the bug

Here’s how it looks.

It’s a very sub­tle effect, but an impor­tant one. The shad­ows above and below the sign are a bit darker, which helps sep­a­rate the sign so it doesn’t just blend into the background.

We could go on and on with effects. There are more than I think I’ll ever use. What I hoped to show here is just how easy it is to iden­tify prob­lems in your pho­tos and cor­rect them quickly and eas­ily with Per­fect Effects. The edge detec­tion in the Per­fect Brush is a major step for­ward in mask­ing. Throw in the com­bi­na­tions of effects and blend modes, and your imag­i­na­tion becomes the only limitation.

Per­fect Portrait

I have to let you in on a lit­tle secret. When Per­fect Por­trait came out, I didn’t want to like it. That’s because I’ve tried other por­trait soft­ware before and found the results lack­ing. I could get bet­ter results using rather sim­ple tech­niques in Pho­to­shop. The trade-​off was time spent vs. qual­ity, and I wanted quality.

Per­fect Por­trait makes retouch­ing ridicu­lously fast and easy. Just to give an exam­ple, here’s a split-​view of a por­trait out of my cam­era with no pre­vi­ous edit­ing. I didn’t even touch any­thing inside of Per­fect Por­trait, other than to click inside the box sur­round­ing the model’s face. This just shows the capa­bil­i­ties of the default set­tings as soon as I loaded the photo. The orig­i­nal photo is on the left and the Per­fect Por­trait adjust­ments are on the right.

With­out any work on my part, Per­fect Por­trait adjusted her skin tone, removed blem­ishes, smoothed her skin while retain­ing pores and tex­ture, bright­ened her eyes, enhanced her lips, and adjusted the con­trast. How long would it take you to do that much work? Per­fect Por­trait did this in a sec­ond or two. Now imag­ine that you have a ton of por­traits to edit from a wed­ding or some event. Instead of dread­ing the man­ual labor for each shot, you can deliver very pleas­ing results in a minus­cule amount of time. To me, that’s just out­stand­ing! It really irks me, too. Just think of all that time I spent learn­ing retouch­ing tech­niques and then apply­ing them, painstak­ingly, to dif­fer­ent por­trait photos.

Those lit­tle lines you see on the eyes and mouth iden­tify key areas that Per­fect Por­trait uses to enhance eyes, teeth and lips. You can tell they’re just a bit off, but it’s easy to move them around.

Al you have to do is place your mouse cur­sor on the lit­tle squares and drag them to change the shape. I’ve tried this on dif­fer­ent sub­jects and dif­fer­ent angles, but they always seem to work.

Of course, some jobs will take more work than oth­ers. You may need to use Phở­to­shop for other retouch­ing, such as using the Liquify tool on her hair. Even if that’s some­thing you want to do with your por­traits, this is a killer way to get started on the basic retouch­ing tasks for skin enhance­ment, whiten­ing teeth, remov­ing shine, bright­en­ing eyes, enhanc­ing lips, etc.

Per­fect Por­trait has its effects bro­ken down for Chil­dren, Females, Groups and Males. Just as with Per­fect Effects, you can load these pre­sets, stack them and use selec­tive editing.

The auto­matic modes are impres­sive, but they don’t cor­rect every­thing that I’d like to fix in a por­trait. For­tu­nately, the tools exist to touch-​up where needed. For exam­ple, I used the Loupe tool at 400% to get a bet­ter view of each eye, and then used the Retouch­ing tool to remove the lit­tle veins in the whites of her eye. You can see the dif­fer­ence between the left eye and the retouch on the right eye.

Per­fect Por­trait is a great time saver and it can pro­duce amaz­ing results. The vari­ables for each ele­ment of the por­trait can range from very sub­tle to over the top, giv­ing you the abil­ity to deter­mine how your final por­trait appears.

The pre­sets and con­trols cover the range you’re likely to expe­ri­ence in por­trait pho­tog­ra­phy. You can adjust for eth­nic­ity, male, female, chil­dren or groups. There are pre­sets to deal with shine, freck­les and a host of other fea­tures found on human faces and skin. Per­fect Por­trait just makes short work of por­trait retouch­ing and does so with nat­ural, believ­able results. I just want to hate it for that, but it really works.

Per­fect Photo Suite: Focal­Point 2

The human eye is drawn towards things that are bright and sharp. Focal­Point gives you the tools to draw your viewer’s eye exactly where you want it to go by pro­vid­ing tools to con­trol these ele­ments. Using the Mask Bug, you can set a blur on your phở­to­graph and selec­tively remove it from the impor­tant areas of your image. Let’s take a look.

First, here’s a photo just loaded into Focal­Point 2. It has a dom­i­nant sub­ject, but the back­ground has a bit too much detail that just isn’t important.

I decided to use a Pla­nar (Rec­tan­gle) mask­ing bug, since my sub­ject fits that size best. You can con­trol some of the aspects by mov­ing the anten­nae — blur, opac­ity and adding a dark or bright vignette. There are slid­ers in the panel to the left for the same con­trols, so it’s up to you to decide which method works best.

Some of the options on the panel aren’t avail­able through the bug. You can choose to model a spe­cific type of lens and that will affect the bokeh in the back­ground. I used a cus­tom 9-​bladed aper­ture lens on this image, so you have the abil­ity to tweak the specs to your lik­ing if a pre­set you want doesn’t exist.

Like the other prod­ucts in Per­fect Photo Suite 7, this took barely any time at all to make my changes to the image. Drag a bug, move a slider or two. Done. As you can see from the final view of the image below, this lit­tle change directs your eye to the sub­ject and dimin­ishes the dis­tract­ing back­ground — all done in a few seconds.

Focal­Point also allows you to adjust high­light bloom — such as when you have lights out­side the depth of field. You can give them a greater pres­ence with the high­light bloom to increase their glow or turn them into an artis­tic back­ground element,

Per­fect Resize

Until recently, I never had much use for Per­fect Resize. It works fine, but my images from my DSLR cam­eras were large enough for any print needs I’d expe­ri­enced. It’s not like I’m print­ing bill­boards or any­thing of that mag­ni­tude. Then my mother sur­prised me with an old photo she found of my brother and me. It was a very small, wallet-​sized print and it put a smile on my face.

That’s my older brother, Don, with the big smile — same smile he still has today. I’m the damn good look­ing kid with the buzz hair­cut and the plaid shirt. My mother found two of these small pho­tos and gave them to us as birth­day presents. I decided to scan the photo and see what I could do.

The full size from the scan was 597×477 pix­els. That’s good enough for use as an avatar, but I started won­der­ing what else I could do with this old photo. That’s when I decided to explore onOne Soft­ware Per­fect Resize 7.

I was slightly con­cerned that I needed to learn a new soft­ware pro­gram to get the results I wanted. That was silly. It couldn’t have been eas­ier to enlarge this photo with great results. In fact, I felt it was absurdly sim­ple. onOne should make it a bit harder so you have more of a sense of per­sonal accom­plish­ment. Enlarg­ing the photo was about as hard as get­ting $20 out of an ATM.

Once I could see my image, I went to the Doc­u­ment Size panel on the right side. As you can see, I just tra­versed the menu options to select the 11×14 size under the Phở­to­graphic menu option. I didn’t want to push my luck going with a larger size. After all, how much would the image degrade after being enlarged so much?

I clicked the Apply but­ton. The screen blinked for half a sec­ond and the job was done. That was pretty damn fast! The only thing left to do was click the Save but­ton and give it a name and a file format.

This is now a 3152×4140 image. That gives plenty of space to go in and do more photo restora­tion — some­thing else I’ll have to try.

Com­pared to mod­ern cam­eras with out­stand­ing sharp­ness, this image may not hold up well tech­ni­cally. When you con­sider that Per­fect Resize 7 gave me such a large image from a worn out wal­let photo that’s over 40 years old, I’d say it’s astound­ing tech­nol­ogy. None of that com­pares to the emo­tional impact of pre­serv­ing a mem­ory. All the imper­fec­tions in the photo fade away and what’s left is a brother’s love. Now that’s a great thing.

Con­clu­sion

I first saw this soft­ware in pre-​release demon­stra­tions at Phở­to­shop World. As it hap­pens, one of my objec­tives for that trip was to speak with onOne Soft­ware to get a bet­ter idea of how to use their soft­ware, at least based upon some prob­lems I had with the pre­vi­ous ver­sions. After watch­ing the pre­view demon­stra­tion, I just kept smil­ing because this release cleared up many of the prob­lems I had with the old software.

For exam­ple, it was hard to decide which effect to use because there wasn’t any pre­view on my image and the effects had irrel­e­vant names — Kryp­tonite, Lord of the Rings, Daily Vit­a­min. You would have to explore each one to really under­stand how it would apply to your photo and I just didn’t have the time for that. Now the effects have much bet­ter orga­ni­za­tion and a quick thumb­nail pre­view means I don’t have to look at the silly names. Just that improve­ment was a great step for­ward. As I demon­strated above, the mask­ing with the Per­fect Brush edge detec­tion is noth­ing short of bril­liant because of its out­stand­ing results while being so easy to use.

One by one, I dis­cov­ered that Per­fect Photo Suite resolved most of the issues I brought to Phở­to­shop World, so I didn’t hes­i­tate to buy my upgrade. Per­fect Por­trait was a com­plete sur­prise to me, but a very wel­come one.

Per­fect Photo Suite by onOne Soft­ware is a great pack­age of photo soft­ware that is pow­er­ful and easy to use. When you think about the com­bi­na­tion of qual­ity image pro­cess­ing effects and time-​saving fea­tures, Per­fect Photo Suite is really just a great value.

You can down­load full ver­sions of the soft­ware for a free trial. In fact, there are some free tools and pre­sets on the site just for the taking.